Frame
- Goal: Break out of three flat months and find which of traffic, conversion or repeat purchase is the weak link.
- Constraints: About 5 hours a week, $300 a month, and a small shop with no mention of a team.
- Decision to make: What to try first, and how to tell within a few weeks whether it worked.
- Out of scope: A rebrand, a new platform, and wholesale at scale.
I couldn't look anything up, so the research below rests on what you told me and general e-commerce knowledge. I've used no outside statistics.
Research
| # | Item | Status | Source or how to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sales are flat for 3 months (roughly Jul–Oct) | Known | You said so |
| 2 | Budget is $300 a month and time is 5 hours a week | Known | You said so |
| 3 | It's late October, so the gifting season (Nov–Dec) is close. Candles usually sell best then | Assumed | Compare last year's monthly sales, if you have them |
| 4 | You haven't yet split the problem into traffic, conversion and repeat | Known | You said you're unsure |
| 5 | Your store platform's analytics (Shopify, Etsy, etc.) can give sessions, conversion rate and repeat-customer rate | Assumed | Check the dashboard. Most platforms show all three |
| 6 | The three causes need different fixes, so guessing wrong wastes the budget | Assumed | General principle |
| 7 | Where your current customers come from (search, Instagram, email, marketplace) | Unknown | Traffic-source report |
| 8 | How many past customers you have, and how many bought more than once | Unknown | Order export, 30 minutes |
Flat sales may not be a problem. If the same three months were flat last year, you may just be in the seasonal lull. Checking last year's figures is the first job.
Options
| # | Option | How it works | Main way it fails | Lens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One-hour funnel diagnosis | Pull sessions, conversion rate and repeat rate for the last 90 days and compare with the prior 90 and last year | Data is thin or tracking is broken | Smallest version |
| 2 | Email past customers | Send a "holiday order early" note with a small perk to everyone who bought before | List is tiny | Quiet option |
| 3 | Post-purchase email flow | Automate a thank-you, a care tips email and a reorder nudge at about 6 weeks | Takes setup hours, and the payoff is slow | Time shift |
| 4 | Gift bundles and sets | Package 3 candles as a gift set at a higher average order value | Doesn't help if traffic is the problem | Combine |
| 5 | Product page fixes | Better photos, burn time, scent notes and reviews placed above the fold | Conversion may already be fine | Inversion (what makes a visitor leave?) |
| 6 | Small paid ads test | Spend $150 on Meta or Google retargeting and interest ads aimed at gift buyers | Money burned if the page doesn't convert | Remove a constraint |
| 7 | Local and craft markets | Do one holiday market to get names and emails | Costs hours, and the stall fee eats budget | Borrow from another field |
| 8 | Micro-influencer swaps | Send free candles to 10 small creators in home or wellness | Low response rate, and it's hard to track | Change who does the work |
| 9 | Ask 10 customers why they bought | Short message or call, then reuse their words in your copy | Small sample | Quiet option |
| 10 | Subscription or "candle of the month" | Recurring revenue from your best customers | Too much work before the holidays | Extreme user |
Shortlist
Scores run 1–5, and higher is always better. Effort and risk are scored so that 5 means low.
| Option | Effort | Risk | Impact before holidays | Speed | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Funnel diagnosis | 5 | 5 | 3 | 5 | 18 |
| 2 Email past customers | 4 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 17 |
| 5 Product page fixes | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 14 |
| 4 Gift bundles | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 14 |
| 6 Paid ads test | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 12 |
| 3 Post-purchase flow | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 11 |
- Funnel diagnosis: it costs nothing, takes an hour, and tells you which of the other options to spend money on.
- Email past customers: it is the fastest and cheapest way to get sales, and it tests repeat purchase directly.
- Product page fixes (tied with gift bundles): if the diagnosis shows traffic but few purchases, this is where the effort goes. Let the diagnosis break the tie.
Next steps (for the top option)
-
First step (within a day): Export 90 days of data. Write down sessions, conversion rate (orders ÷ sessions), average order value, the share of orders from repeat customers, and the top traffic sources. Compare with the previous 90 days and the same months last year.
-
Cheapest test: Read the numbers like this.
- Sessions are down or flat, and conversion is normal (often 1–3% for small shops, though that's a rough rule of thumb): traffic is the problem.
- Sessions are healthy but conversion is under about 1%: conversion is the problem.
- Both look fine but few orders come from returning buyers: repeat is the problem.
Then send the past-customer email (option 2) in the same week. It costs $0 and gives a second signal.
-
Depends most on: Assumption #5, that your analytics are accurate enough to read. If they aren't, install basic tracking first and use the customer interviews (option 9) in the meantime.
Rough budget once you know the weak link: keep about $100 in reserve for the gift-bundle packaging or photos, and spend up to $150–200 on ads only if traffic is the problem and your product pages already convert.
Open questions
- Which platform do you sell on? A marketplace like Etsy gives different data and levers than your own site. Your dashboard will show it.
- Were these same months flat or slow last year? Last year's order history will tell you.
- How many customers have bought, and how many bought twice? The order export will tell you.
- Is the holiday gifting window your biggest sales period? Last year's November and December sales will show it.
If you send me the three numbers from the diagnosis (sessions, conversion rate, repeat share), I can go deeper on whichever option they point to.
Real run in an isolated directory with only this skill installed. Tools were limited to Skill and Read, so nothing was searched online and the research phase rests on what the user wrote plus general knowledge, which the output says itself. The made-up shop and numbers are example input. The answer is about 1,200 words, longer than the roughly 900 the skill asks for.
它做什麼
分四個階段帶模型處理開放式議題，最後給出建議，而不是一長串點子。
運作方式
- 定框架：寫清目標、限制、要做的決定與不在範圍內的內容。
- 做調研：把已知、假設、未知分開列，每條都有來源或驗證方法。不編造事實，查不到就明說。
- 發散：用至少三種角度（反向思考、拿掉一項限制、最小版本、借鏡其他領域等）產生至少八個真正不同的方案，並寫明每個方案最主要的失敗方式。
- 收斂：依你的目標提煉出評分標準替方案打分，選出前三名，並給出第一名的第一步、最便宜的驗證方式，以及它最依賴的假設。
適合情境
- 有幾個方向時，決定先試哪一個
- 投入之前探索新想法、產品、專案或計畫
- 在混亂的局面中把事實與猜測分開
不適合撰寫程式碼、規格或 PRD。輸出可能偏長，需要的話可以請它縮短。
注意：Skill 本身是英文的。
低風險：純指令，沒有腳本、不連網、不寫入檔案。它自己不會去查資料；除非你的代理能上網搜尋或讀取你指定的檔案，否則調研階段只依據你提供的資訊與一般知識，輸出中也會如此說明。它列出的事實與經驗數值請當作待查證的線索，不要當成已驗證的資料。